Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds
An alarming study shows massive East Antarctic ice sheet already is a significant contributor to sea-level rise
Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis
January 14 at 3:00 PM (Washington Post)
Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water — a startling new finding that researchers say could mean sea levels are poised to rise more quickly than predicted in coming decades.
The Antarctic lost 40 billion tons of melting ice to the ocean each year from 1979 to 1989. That figure rose to 252 billion tons lost per year beginning in 2009, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the region is losing six times as much ice as it was four decades ago, an unprecedented pace in the era of modern measurements. (It takes about 360 billion tons of ice to produce one millimeter of global sea-level rise.)
“I don’t want to be alarmist,” said Eric Rignot, an Earth-systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA who led the work. But he said the weaknesses that researchers have detected in East Antarctica — home to the largest ice sheet on the planet — deserve deeper study.
“The places undergoing changes in Antarctica are not limited to just a couple places,” Rignot said. “They seem to be more extensive than what we thought. That, to me, seems to be reason for concern.”
The findings are the latest sign that the world could face catastrophic consequences if climate change continues unabated. In addition to more-frequent droughts, heat waves, severe storms and other extreme weather that could come with a continually warming Earth, scientists already have predicted that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not sharply decrease its carbon output. But in recent years, there has been growing concern that the Antarctic could push that even higher.
That kind of sea-level rise would result in the inundation of island communities around the globe, devastating wildlife habitats and threatening drinking-water supplies. Global sea levels have already risen seven to eight inches since 1900.
The full drivel here
Why do I call it “drivel”? Three reasons:
1. Anything Chris Mooney writes about climate is automatically in that category, because he can’t separate his fear of doom from his writing.
2. The math doesn’t work in the context of the subheadline. Alarming? Read on.
3. Data back to 1972…where?
First, let’s get some data. Wikipedia, while biased towards alarmism in this reference, at least has the basic data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet
It covers an area of almost 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and contains 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice.[2]A cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately one metric gigaton, meaning that the ice sheet weighs 26,500,000 gigatons.
Now for the math.
So, if the Antarctic ice sheet weighs 26,500,000 gigatonnes or 26500000000000000 tonnes
252 billion tonnes is 252 gigatonnes
Really simple math says: 252gt/26,500,000gt x 100 = 9.509433962264151e-4 or 0.00095% change per year
But this is such a tiny loss in comparison to the total mass of the ice sheet, it’s microscopic…statistically insignificant.
In the email thread that preceded this story (h/t to Marc Morano) I asked people to check my work. Willis Eschenbach responded, corrected an extra zero, and pointed this out:
Thanks, Anthony. One small issue. You’ve got an extra zero in your percentage, should be 0.00095% per year loss.
Which means that the last ice will melt in the year 3079 …
I would also note that 250 billion tonnes of ice is 250 billion cubic meters. Spread out over the ocean, that adds about 0.7 mm/year to the sea level … that’s about 3 inches (7 cm) per century.
As you said … microscopic.
w.
Paul Homewood noted in the email thread:
Ice losses from Antarctica have tripled since 2012, increasing global sea levels by 0.12 inch (3 millimeters) in that timeframe alone, according to a major new international climate assessment funded by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2749/ramp-up-in-antarctic-ice-loss-speeds-sea-level-rise/
0.5mm per year.
Not a lot to worry about.
“They attribute the threefold increase in ice loss from the continent since 2012 to a combination of increased rates of ice melt in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, and reduced growth of the East Antarctic ice sheet.”
Translation: The volcano riddled West/Peninsula is melting bit more and the Eastern Sheet is growing a little less than usual.
Paul Homewood adds on his website:
Firstly, according to NASA’s own press release, the study only looks at data since 1992. The Mail’s headline (Taken from the Washington Post – Anthony) that “Antarctica is losing SIX TIMES more ice a year than it was in the 1970s “ is totally fake, as there is no data for the 1970s. Any estimates of ice loss in the 1970s and 80s are pure guesswork, and have never been part of this NASA IMBIE study, or previous ones.
Secondly, the period since 1992 is a ridiculously short period on which to base any meaningful conclusions at all. Changes over the period may well be due to natural, short term fluctuations, for instance ocean cycles. We know, as the NASA study states, that ice loss in West Antarctica is mainly due to the inflow of warmer seas.
The eruption of Pinatubo in 1991 is another factor. Global temperatures fell during the next five years, and may well have slowed down ice melt.
Either way, Pinkstone’s claim that the ice loss is due to global warming is fake. It is a change in ocean current that is responsible, and nothing to do with global warming.
Then there is his pathetic claim that “Antarctica is shedding ice at a staggering rate”. Alarmist scientists, and gullible reporters, love to quote impressive sounding numbers, like 252 gigatons a year. In fact, as NASA point out, the effect on sea level rise since 1992 is a mere 7.6mm, equivalent to 30mm/century.
Given that global sea levels have risen no faster since 1992 than they did in the mid 20thC, there is no evidence that Antarctica is losing ice any faster than then. To call it staggering is infantile.
NASA also reckon that ice losses from Antarctica between 2012 and 2017 increased sea levels by 3mm, equivalent to 60mm/century. Again hardly a scary figure. But again we must be very careful about drawing conclusions from such a short period of time. Since 2012, we have had a record 2-year long El Nino. What effect has this had?
But back to that previous NASA study, carried out by Jay Zwally in 2015, which found:
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.
Far from losing ice, as the new study thinks, Zwally’s 2015 analysis found the opposite, that the ice sheet was growing.
OK, Zwally’s data only went up to 2008, but there are still huge differences. Whereas Zwally estimates ice gain of between 82 and 112 billion tonnes a year between 1992 and 2008, the new effort guesses at a loss of 83 billion tonnes a year.
It is worth pointing out that Zwally’s comment about the IPCC 2013 report refers to the 2012 IMBIE report, which was the forerunner to the new study, the 2018 IMBIE.
Quite simply, nobody has the faintest idea whether the ice cap is growing or shrinking, never mind by how much, as the error margins and uncertainties are so huge.
The best guide to such matters comes from tide gauges around the world. And these continue to show that sea levels are rising no faster then mid 20thC, and at a rate of around 8 inches per century.
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I wanna see Antarctic Climate Researchers visit the White Continent during the Southern Winter.
Stay there for three-four months without daylight and then get back to us about how Global Warming is threatening the ice in Antarctica.
‘Mail on line’ is mainly ‘birds’ observer review but much less the serious science.
The mail on line is a soft p0rn site, not a newspaper. But it is generally right-biased end of UK politics, not a “liberal” outlet likely to echo WaPo.
What is a little concerning is that having published some properly skeptical articles by David Rose they now seem to have been convinced to “get with the program”.
They had a change of editor recently which has shifted the position of the paper on things like Trump and climate change.
So. you’re saying that the newspaper underwent a significant climate change
And they have also apparently lost a lot of readers as a consequence.
I wonder if at some point advocates and activists will realize that false alarms do very little to further their cause, and are probably counterproductive. False alarms may solidify the views of those who are already convinced on the alarmist side, but they also make skeptics more comfortable in their skepticism.
Those in the middle may be made more fearful, but what happens when find out they’ve been fed false a pile of hooey?
For twenty years ago there was hardly any ice loss, so just a small increase could be calculated to many times more than nothing.
Mosher: “It’s a projection, not a prediction, dummy!”
projection based on meaningless extrapolation WAY outside the period of data.
As is typical of all this climate pseudo-science, they have a very limited period of data , fit a linear model of average “trend” for no valid scientific reason then project this model off into the future for a period many times larger than the sample period.
That degree of extrapolation is totally unscientific and is a key reason why this can be dismissed as pseudo-science without more sophisticated arguments.
‘I don’t want to be alarmist,” said Eric Rignot’
Riiiight.
… but it pays better.
… but it’s required to work here.
OR
… but it’s in my DNA
… but I can’t help it
OR
… but all my friends are alarmist
… but it’s the trendy thing to be
OR
… but I’m not qualified to do anything else
… but it’s an addiction and withdrawal is too hard
Be fair and read what he said after that instead of kneejerk dismissal.
As our host points out, the data is weak and the uncertainties large. That … — deserve deeper study.
I think we will have much more pressing and important issued to deal with before 2100 but “reason for concern” is not alarmist.
Greg:
It is as “alarmist” as claiming there is “reason for concern” because the Sun came up this morning.
Richard
Rent seeking, nothing more.
Greg. Its long past time of giving the benefit of the doubt to those propagating and furthering the hunch – of human-caused climate change – by suggestions like yours that some of those embedded in the hunch are engaged in altruism. I recently reached out to the sole non-Left think tank in Ireland so as to hopefully engage the well-known principal representative in a debate on how the Irish media are totally and utterly entrenched in catastrophism. I had noticed that he and his deputy were absent from regular broadcast debates on how the planet is doomed from all theburning of hydrocarbons. His cordial response shocked me. Rather than enquiring what I wanted to discuss he replied he regarded those who dispute the science as “strange and irresponsible”. He also said that he had noticed evidence of climate all around him in his daily life. We have passed the point of cult status when it comes to the majority believing this climate science junk.
If the ice caps are growing, that’s reason for concern.
The intent is to cause alarm. There is no attempt to reassure us there is NO need to be concerned. There is no other way to interpret, ”That, to me, seems to be reason for concern”
Giving a quick mention that it may ”deserve deeper study” is the token gesture phrase that gets him off the hook in the future when things don’t go according to plan. He can refer to that and say, ”See, I told you it needed more research.”
Regards, Eamon.
So what do we make of the Cook Mann Antarctic study that from 1979 forward the Eastern Antarctic temperature dropped .2 C per decade? It is already below freezing and the temperature drops .2 C per decade. The drop from 1979 to date would be .8 C. But it is supposedly ‘melting’ at an increased rate? So this must be the product of Oxycontins.
Facts mean nothing , headlines everything that is climate ‘sceince ‘ and AGW proponets , in action .
Therefore proving their facts wrong has zero effect because these do not matter in the first place.
Obviously, the CAGW crowd is really running scared now and doubling down with really catastrophic predictions. After so many years of crying wolf, most realists are no longer listening, and have moved on to real problems
The science was settled in the 1990s. Why does NASA keep changing their narrative?
Go to climate4you -> oceans + polar temperature.
The Argo Circum-Antarctic ocean temperatures 2004 -> from surface to 1900 m depth show no trend.
The HadCRUT4 Antarctic monthly surface air temperatures south of 70S, 2000 -> show no trend.
The HadCRUT4 Antarctic monthly surface temperatures 70-90 S, 1957 -> shows no overall trend.
Perhaps that insidious gas, as well as causing everything from acne to potholes, melts ice.
The Washington Post is peer reviewed by peers of Chris Mooney. Journalism is dead there.
the new media is more corrupt than anyone could have ever imagined…and it forms what people think
Another Ebola out break is going on….won’t report it because of the wall..immigrants/disease
The reports in WUWT function as a type of comic relief.
Daily, honest deconstruction of what’s coming from the MSM, lightens my mood.
“the new[s] media is more corrupt than anyone could have ever imagined…and it forms what people think”
(I assume you meant “news” when alluding to WaPo.)
What’s black and white and red all over?
A sunburned zebra.
Or a penguin in a blender.
Amen
I agree with the last paragraph. As the tide gauges are showing no acceleration in sea level rise, these estimates of Antarctic melting are probably wrong.
About the claim that sea level has risen no faster since 1992 than in the mid 20th century: This December 17 2018 WUWT article by Willis Eschenbach indicates something different – that there has been sea level rise acceleration, although less than that claimed by ones who claim sea level rise has been accelerating.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/17/inside-the-acceleration-factory/
Sea levels 8000 years ago were ca. 2 meter higher than today. Stop worrying!
Donald,
The basis for Willis’ analysis was Church & White 2011.
Read this abstract from Gregory, Church et al. from 2013: https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00319.1
Donald,
I think you must’ve missed some tongue in cheek.
The ‘acceleration’ mentioned is so small as to be essentially non-existent.
Donald,
Shirley you can’t be serious?
Did you actually read it?
Did you not get what was meant by “acceleration factory”?
Factory, as in a place where things are manufactured.
Here is the actual conclusion from Willis:
“And this makes it very likely that Church and White are manufacturing sea level acceleration where none exists … bad scientists, no cookies.”
And don’t call me Shirley.
“You’ve got an extra zero in your percentage, should be 0.00095% per year loss.
Which means that the last ice will melt in the year 3079.”
When I saw the first number I thought, well… that means 1% every thousand years, and was ready to set aside a bottle of champagne for somewhere around the year 103079.
Bingo. 0.00095% per year => by the year 3079 1% will have melted.
Ah, can’t count zeroes either. Lol.
Let’s “count” together.
0.00095% per year would be 0.0095% per decade, 0.095% per century, and 0.95% per millennium.
Yes, it doesn’t melt for over 100,000 years.
I think it will actually stop within the next few thousand years or so, when we begin to experience the cooling which precedes the next glaciation cycle.
I meant I can’t count.Sorry for confusing form.
Oh dear, better start organising some swimming lessons for the kids then!
What?
Swimming? Sounds like all I have to do to be prepared for this minute rise is dust off my old platform shoes from the 70’s!
” Stayin’ aliiiive”
Michael Perse
I think flip flops would be enough.
The melt must have increased even more dramatically since 2015, when NASA announced that mass gains of ice exceeded the losses. It’s flipped from net ice gain to massive losses of billions of tonnes of ice, in such a short time!!
(But, of course, this is nothing to do with science. It’s seemingly just an in-house ego-battle between Zwally and Rignot. With Zwally generously considering accretion on the plateau, and Rignot obsessing over glacial melting at the perimeter. Seemingly.)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses
One ugly fact can ruin a string of beautiful theories. The ugly fact is that global temperature 1000 years ago were at least one degree C. warmer than today, for a period of at least 100 years – and 8000 years ago probably 2 degrees warmer.
Why all the worries, for heaven’s sake?
People who are not worried are usually happier than people who are worried. Happy people can not be controlled as easily as unhappy people.
Don’t you realize that all creatures were extinct back then
Maybe so, but not as many as are about to be erased by evil capitalists.
And oil companies. And just “everyday people”, of which, there are way too many.
And when dinosaurs ruled the earth, CO2 was about 10 times as high as it is now. Yet some claim that if CO2 doubles, all life will end.
No. We will revert to dinosaurs.
Anthropocene Park!
To be fair, sea levels WERE higher 8,000 years ago, perhaps a meter or so if I recall correctly. That kind of sea level rise today would cause a lot of trouble. That’s what the alarmists want us to think is happening now, though when it happened before it was all perfectly natural, and there’s zero evidence linking today’s sea level rise to anything but natural causes.
This is much better, the EurekAlert! crap is starting to depress me just thinking about all the energy, time and money being spent on propaganda is very depressing. Thanks for the uplifting Anthony!
ditto
abc rn aus ran this early yesterday
i get angry hearing this drivel,
depressed we cant get the debinking onto media to fight back
i sure annoy;-) mates with a lot of email links to wuwt
my hertfelt thansk also Anthony et al
Mooney says:
“Antarctic glaciers have been melting at an accelerating pace over the past four decades thanks to an influx of warm ocean water”
This is the; “Warm water flows underneath the colder surface water – underneath the sea ice – underneath the shelf ice and THEN melts the ice sheet at the grounding line.” BS isn’t it?
Will someone please debunk this crap.
You’ve already done so.
If they seem to just make it up as they go along, it’s probably because they know nobody bothers to even read most of it anymore, so they can say what they like with impunity.
Ice loss from Antarctica has sextupled since the 1970s, new research finds
More fake science, fake news.
No it hasn’t. Th extent is allmost back to the 2014 MAX, a maximum since a long time.
Zhang et al., 2019
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Liping_Zhang19/publication/329372480_Natural_variability_of_Southern_Ocean_convection_as_a_driver_of_observed_climate_trends/links/5c0592f4a6fdcc315f9ad416/Natural-variability-of-Southern-Ocean-convection-as-a-driver-of-observed-climate-trends.pdf
“Observed Southern Ocean surface cooling and sea-ice expansion over the past several decades are inconsistent with many historical simulations from climate models. Here we show that natural multidecadal variability involving Southern Ocean convection may have contributed strongly to the observed temperature and sea-ice trends.”
Models say warming ocean and decaying ice at Antartica:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Southern-Ocean-temp-and-sea-ice-modeling-failures-Zhang-2019.jpg
Reality (observations) says cooling ocean and increasing ice, even with the Western Volcano’s doing their best:
http://notrickszone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Southern-Ocean-cooling-and-sea-ice-growing-since-1979-Zhang-2019.jpg
This is not about sea ice, which has no effect on sea level, since it is already floating on the ocean.
But, the “study” concluding that Antarctica is seeing a 600% increase in ice melt since 1992 claims it is due to warm ocean waters. The Zhang et al. 2019 paper, as long as many other, not to mention empirical data, all show that the Southern Ocean is COOLING in recent decades.
I know that the cult of global warming has trouble with words, but the difference between what ‘warming’ and ‘cooling’ means should be such a simple concept that even a brain damaged caveman should get it.
And if you look at Chartic you’ll see that the antarctic sea ice extent is the lowest it has been since 1979 for the date. I would expect that less seaice means a warmer ocean since there is now ocean where there was formerly ice.
Bullshit. This is the Antarctic. Ice extent is almost back to 2014 extent which is the maximum extent in decades.
Observations say that the sea around Antartica is cooling and is cool, it is not as the models have. Just look at the pictures I linked to.
One set shows reality (observations) and the other the average of climate models (WRONG).
When I see the tide gauge readings at The Battery in NYC start accelerating, I will start believing the AGW=Drowning meme. It has been rock solid at about 3 mm/yr increase since 1850 – that’s 165 years with no change up or down. And if one is to believe that the recent ~9 years of data from the GPS altimeter gauge at the site represents land elevation changes over the full 165 years of the tide gauge record, then about 2 mm/yr of the relative sea level rise has in fact been due to the and sinking. If you instead choose to consider that the GPS data only represents the past 9 years of elevation changes and there was none before, then The Battery tide gauge shows there to be a sudden decrease in sea level rise from 3mm/yr to 1 mm/yr beginning about 2011! Either way, there is no increase to be sure.
Tamino’s recent blog has shown that the New England coast (NY north) sea level is rising more slowly than the median for the east coast whereas the mid atlantic coast sea level is rising more rapidly than the median. The difference being due to differences in the two regions vertical land movement. His fits to data since 1950 show an increase in trend since the 1980s (mid atlantic 2.8-5.1mm/yr), (NE 1.5-4.1).
Phil.:
The blogger who posts as “Tamino” is an academic who
(a) publishes work in the academic literature
and
(b) posts tripe he is not willing to put his name to on his blog.
Richard
Only fools follow Tamino. I gave up on him a long time ago due to his mendacious behavior.
The beauty of estimating ice loss in Antarctica from GRACE data is that the raw data does not differ significantly from zero, so the result depends entirely on which GIA correction you use. Since there is very little actual GIA data from Antarctica (and the data that does exist doesn’t fit any of the GIA models) this allows a rather considerable degree of flexibility in your results.
So sextupled might be seventupled, doubled, milliontupled, or even negative billiontupled and it would not mean anything. This whole ‘sextupled’ is meaningless. We don’t really know the sign of the seventies change, so using n-tupled comparison is methodologically wrong.
There must be some central meme clearing house where scheduling of the flotilla of alarms are meted out to researchers. Polar bears were the big thing unti they clearly proved to be just fine thank you. It was so serious an alarm that extinction was nigh. Today, it seems taboo for alarmists to mention these critters. Likewise Penguins are no longer profitable. Hurricanes were once the canaries in the coal mine until we went 12yrs, a new record, without landfalling H and they went quiet until another rash of them in1917 and 18, about the same frequency as in the 1950s. Now they are back in vogue.
Antarctic ice and Greenland melting are on the quickest scheduling cycle, because since “The Great Greening^тм” and associated bumper crops, about which cloistered silence is strictly enforced except for a couple of pallid attempts to show why it’s a bad thing, fell flat on their faces (egad, we cant have a positive benefit of “carbon”) and sealevel rise is the sort of last resort for calamity. The shrillness of the retreating mountain glaciers catastrophe is now crickets. Do the world mountain glaciers folk still issue a report -it used to be in your face every year.
The icecaps are becoming the last beachhead and they have proved mainly unsatisfactory. They too are destined to become ‘crickets’ as the end of the line for falsified climate theory inexorably approaches.
Never lose sight of where Chris Mooney worked before: https://www.desmogblog.com/chris_mooney
That noise you hear is the late Washington Post Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee spinning in his grave over Mooney’s label as “reporter.”
For anyone who is interested in the nuts and bolts of this issue, I found this analysis useful from Steve McIntyre:
https://climateaudit.org/2015/12/02/antarctic-ice-mass-controversies/
So anyone looking at tide gauges can see the rate of change in sea level has been constant for over a century, and that is ignoring the revisions that erased the flat spots in the trend that used to be what was shown by official graphs.
And ocean total heat content is rising faster than ever, and glaciers are melting faster than ever, and ice sheets are melting faster than ever, and groundwater and surface waters are being pumped for irrigation, adding that to the evaporation and runoff that eventually winds up in the ocean.
It does not add up.
Very simple.
Rate of change of sea level would have to be showing on the tide gauges if all of these other things were occurring.
Wavier than ever, meltier than ever, tidier than ever, warmier than ever, droughtier than ever, floodier than ever, changier than ever.
What is actually happening that can explain all of this?
Making stuff up, more shamelessly than ever.
That is the only thing the climate mafia are actually expert at.
“….East Antarctica — home to the largest ice sheet on the planet — deserve deeper study.’ This a study to encourage more money for more studies.
Typo
I think this is missing a couple zeroes, like 3079000 or something, error being a bit large.
Sorry too fast. 100,000 is a better guess, as said above.
It’s a good thing that we can linearly extrapolate the last 20 years of data into the next 100,000 years.
True, might still be totally wrong. There’s no reason to trust the ice age would end because of human emissions. It could take millions of years. Hansen would disagree, and I’d say bollocks, old hippie.
Scientists use models to measure the movement of land mass in response to changes the ice sheet sitting on top. For example, Zwally said eastern Antarctica’s land mass has been going down in response to ice sheet mass gains.
That land movement effects ice sheet data, especially in Antarctica where small errors in GIA can yield big changes ice sheet mass balance — whether ice is growing or shrinking. There are also differences in how researchers model firn compaction and snowfall accumulation.
“It needs to be known accurately,” Zwally said. “It’s an error of being able to model. These are models that estimate the motions of the Earth under the ice.”
https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/15/antarctica-ice-sheets/
There are glaciers flowing quicker into the oceans as the front melts quicker but due to current flow. If there is any connection to climate, its because the major reason for climate change is the ocean currents.
eg.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0485%282004%290342.0.CO%3B2. (written by ship of fools guy so not the work of deniers).
Robert B. The good thing about using Icesat data (as Zwally did) in contrast to GRACE is that for height data as Icesat measures the GIA uncertainty is proprtionally much smaller.
If the bedrock moves 1 cm up or down this will affect the thickness of the ice by 1 cm for ICESAT, but the same movement will affect the GRACE data by the depth of ice with a mass equal to one centimeter of rock, i e a little over 3 cm.
This does not imply that Icesat measurements is more precise than GRACE, the opposite is almost certainly true, but GRACE data are much more ambiguous in the absence of actual GIA measurements, which will never be available for most of Antarctica since there is no accessible bedrock.
Ice is melting… ice is accumulating. I say potAto you say poTAHto.
Who do we believe?
Well, always best to go to the bottom line results .. is sea level rise accelerating, or not.
The data say no.
Maybe the Forest Service sociologist can take a run at how confused scare stories based on one study get blared in the media. Hiring an obvious advocate to write what amount to press releases is reprehensible.
If it’s faulty as it appears to be marshal the facts and ask for a correction. The response if you get one should be interesting.